Big Damn Movie

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This trope refers to the habit of movies based on TV shows casting the main characters as being involved in a dramatic plot, particularly when nothing remotely similar happens in the series itself. This can be as big as the world or as small as recess, just so long as it is made "epic". Oddly enough, often seems to involve neighborhoods being torn down to build shopping malls.

Due to the fact that nearly all movie adaptations use this trope to some degree (after all, it's hard to keep up an epic tone across a 13-52 episode season), examples shall be limited to things that involve a large change in dynamic.

Spoofed with an ad often seen in theatres which appears to depict the M&Ms characters in a movie trailer for a Big Damn Movie involving espionage, acrobatics, and bomb diffusion. Then someone's cell phone goes off, revealing the trailer to actually be a "No Talking or Phones" Warning. Red storms away in disgust at the realization that there's not really going to be a movie.

Anime & Manga

The Golgo 13 manga had Duke Togo traveling the world and working for and against the world's superpower nations while changing the course of history. Still, the original movie (The Professional) had the father of one of his targets angry and powerful enough to send the combined forces of Eagleland — the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. Military, and a Carnival of Killers — against the lone wolf Anti-Hero.

Not to say Pokémon isn't action packed but the movies tend to be more dramatic, the battles more actiony, and there always seems to be some sort of big dilemma involving the fate of the world.

You're Under Arrest! is a goofy anime about a couple of cops. It has its action scenes, and its drama, but it isn't as dramatic as other Lovely Angels series. The Movie is dark, action packed, and deals with terrorists.

Crayon Shin-chan is a slice-of-life anime about a Wise Beyond Their Years boy and his family and friends. Every movie is about said boy and his friends and family saving their town, country or even the world.

Doraemon LOVES this trope. The regular manga and TV series involves just the mundane daily life of the protagonist, his robotic cat, and his other elementary school friends in suburban Tokyo. However, the series' movies will always be huge epic adventure stories (often set in elaborate sci-fi/mythological/high fantasy locations) and the main characters are inevitably portrayed as the brave action heroes.

Long before the series itself underwent Cerebus Syndrome, Ranma ˝ was a series that mainly concentrated on the wacky martial-arts hijinx Ranma and company got into. The first movie has Akane getting kidnapped by a mystical Chinese fighter and leaving the rest of the cast going an an epic journey halfway across the country trying to rescue her.

Mystery series Detective Conan can often have action chase scenes, but they're always of a much smaller scale. The films are more akin to action-packed adventure summer blockbusters like Die Hard: Not only is there still the Victim of the Week, but in solving the movie cases Conan generally has to get through giant set pieces that in turn yield several amounts of property damage and enough explosions that would make Michael Bay proud.

Not even Cowboy Bebop could ignore this trope. While it was already action-packed, the tv series primarily focused on the five main characters just trying to earn enough to get by. The movie ups the stakes considerably as it has the Bebop crew fighting to stop a bio-terrorist from annihilating all of Mars.

The first Yo-kai Watch movie played things a bit more serious, similar to the tie-in episodes of the series but also adding something it lacked that the video games had: A Big Bad who threatened the safety of both worlds.

Some of Garfield Specials are a bit more dramatic than the comic strip. For example, "Here Comes Garfield" has Garfield saving Odie from the pound, "Garfield on the Town" has Garfield reuniting with his family in the alleys, and "Garfield in the Rough" has Garfield fighting a panther. And then there's Garfield: His 9 Lives.

The Ottifants is a German newspaper comic that got a Short Runner TV series in the 90's, which itself was adapted into a Big Damn Movie in the early 2000's.

The Paddington Bear books are about Paddington comically misunderstanding everyday situations and muddling through regardless (although sometimes he has to give someone a Hard Stare). Paddington is about him being pursued by a Cruella to Animals taxidermist.

The Trope Namer by way of Fan Nickname is Serenity. In the series, the Firefly team is mostly sailing around The Verse trying to make ends meet and keep out of the Alliance's hands; they aren't setting out to be Big Damn Heroes. Come The Movie, it's time to get off their duffs and Bring News Back about the Alliance's biggest screwup yet, while being chased by a superhumanly-dangerous Operative. The series may have been meant to eventually build up to such large actions, but its early cancellation meant that it had to be wrapped up all at once.

Word of God has it that the second season was planned to conclude with what happens about 3/4 of the way through the film (i.e. the discovery of the planet Miranda)

Movie versions of popular comedy skits frequently aim for an "epic quest" type of story, which is self-evidently insane. I.e. A Night at the Roxbury, about two one-note characters and their epic quest to get into the best nightclub in the world.

Note that the only real difference between the movie and a regular episode's plot is that Red and the gang are actually shown doing it instead of Red telling the story after the fact.

The Thick of It was a dialogue-driven political dramedy about petty grudges and in-fighting in the British government, and most episodes featured the spin doctor Anti-Hero Malcolm Tucker dealing with PR blunders and keeping his fellow party members in line. The movie spin-off, In the Loop, involved Malcolm getting involved with international diplomacy in the United States on the eve of a full-on war in the Middle East.

The Sweeney generally dealt with small scale crimes such as bank robberies. The 1977 movie dealt with a complex espionage plot with an attempt to assassinate a foreign ambassador. However they seemed to realise this was silly, so in the 1978 movie they went stuck to foiling particularly nasty bank robberies.

The plot of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie revolved around attempts by Mike and the bots to escape the Satellite of Love. Even though the plot has been done before in episodes of the series, the movie actually shows consistent attempts at escape, all usually ending in spectacular failure.

The TV-movie for Are You Afraid of the Dark? definitely counts. The TV series was simply a story every episode, where a member of the Midnight Society tells a scary story with made-up characters enduring the peril. The movie was about the Midnight Society themselves, beginning with the death of the main character's grandfather, leading into the group having to gather pieces of a broken record to find clues as to the location of a mysterious "Silver Sight," which turns out to be a silver marble that has to power to erase people from existence, and adds a creepy old man and a Creepy Child who are both a little too interested in the situation. Ladies and gentlemen, Tale of the Silver Sight.

Coming soon from We're Running Out of Toys to Turn Into Action Movies!

The Lizzie McGuire Movie: Lizzie and her class (minus Miranda) goes to Rome, and Lizzie has to impersonate a missing famous Italian pop star who happens to look exactly like her.

Most of the Heisei Kamen Rider films have been BDMs, pitting the stakes to post-apocalyptic levels in some (namely Faiz and Kabuto).

Star Trek, in all of its various TV incarnations, typically tells character-driven stories about politics and day-to-day exploration in space, typically ending with An Aesop about cultural understanding and the importance of avoiding violence. Even the relatively Darker and Edgier series in the franchise, which are more likely to involve proper "bad guys", never quite take it all the way to "action thriller IN SPACE!" The movies, on the other hand, invariably involve the Enterprise crew going on epic quests through space and time and facing off against unsavory characters in cool space battles with lots of Stuff Blowing Up.

Big Time Rush's Big Time Movie involves the band fighting off MI-6 to rescue a secret agent from a supervillain.

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa: Radio Norwich is being held hostage by a disgruntled DJ and the hapless presenter becomes a seige negotiator.

Da Ali G Show is a Mockumentary series about the titular chav-talking wannabe rapper running his own talk show, and conducting unscripted interviews with people in amusing locations. Sacha Baron Cohen's first big-screen Spin-Off, Ali G Indahouse, was a fully scripted political satire about Ali running for Parliament and fending off a plot to depose the Prime Minister of Britain.

Baron's two other movie spinoffs, Borat and Brüno, both avert this trope, as they're actually pretty close to the show in scope and style. Interestingly, they turned out to be much more critically and financially successful than Indahouse (particularly the runaway hit Borat), demonstrating that this trope isn't always required for a successful adaptation.

Bean has Mr. Bean travelling to America and saving his new friend's career ... admittedly from Bean himself. Spoofed in the trailer for Mr. Bean's Holiday - which, the deep-voiced narrator informs us, is about "one man's journey...to the beach."

Help!: Granted, anything with the Beatles in at the peak of their power is fairly awesome anyway, but then you throw in the British Army's tanks surrounding the band playing near Stonehenge accompanied by Stuff Blowing Up, the stadium of people singing 'Ode to Joy' to calm a tiger. That last one may just be a shot of Stock Footage, but it's still epic.

The 2011 movie is about saving the studio from demolition by a greedy oil tycoon.

The follow-up to The Muppets was Muppets Most Wanted, about Kermit (while on a European tour with the rest of the Muppets) being temporarily replaced with an insane criminal who looks almost exactly like him (save for a shorter collar and a mole), and getting thrown in a gulag because of it.

Follow That Bird involves the other characters tracking down and rescuing Big Bird from some seedy amusement park operators. Note that this is a film for a PBS educational TV series aimed at toddlers—it does not make for sweet dreams among its target demographic.

To Boldly Flee: They convert The Nostalgia Critic's house into a spaceship, which they use to traverse the solar system (and save the universe).

Conversely, the Atop the Fourth Wall movie (which used a plot element from To Boldly Flee as part of its premise) just felt like part of the show's plot without any of the reviewing but when you have a main character who went up against multiple elder gods who threatened all of reality, it's not exactly easy to raise the stakes. It did have an decently large amount of guest stars contrast the series itself usually does though.

The Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie: The Nerd sets out to make a video on the infamous New Mexico dumping site for the even more infamous ET The Extraterrestrial video game. Then things start going horribly awry for the Nerd.

Alfred's Playhouse: In the original series, Alfred Freaked Out for the duration until he encountered his Evil inner counterpart who taught him the true dark nature of his childish Playhouse. In the movie, we are promised to see his deranged exploits and continuous mental breakdown as he plugs himself into the internet in an attempt at world domination.

The show itself never features any of the characters saving anything other than their treehouse and usually deals with problems faced by individual characters. And yet when the movie rolled around, suddenly everything needs to be "bigger."note Featuring spy gadgets, kids infiltrating corporate buildings, a runaway bus, explosions, and a bulldozer army. The movie is such a notable example that this Trope use to be known as "Why is Arnold saving something?"

Later on, the creative team planned another film that was supposed to be even bigger, involving no less than a trip to the jungle to find the titular character's missing parents, while facing a river pirate crew. It got Screwed by the Network only to be revived over a decade later.

Animaniacs had Wakko's Wish. The movie itself isn't as "epic" as most Big Damn Movies, but it definitely qualifies for this trope by the standards of Animaniacs. It's a sort of Elseworlds set in an indefinite vaguely European time period, where the Warners are poor young orphans in a small village called Acme Falls; it's the only time all the show's normally segregated segments come together. Wakko accidentally wishes on the one star in the sky that grants wishes and it falls to Earth, leading to a massive race between the characters to reach the Wishing Star first.

The Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie has the main characters trying to save their city from an evil exercise machine. They fail get sidetracked.

The first live-action Flintstones film has ambition, loyalty, betrayal, corporate intrigue, and a climactic battle upon an elaborate makeshift Death Trap. An average episode of the TV series is basically just Wacky Hijinks.

A Man Called Flintstone: The animated movie had Fred turn out to be the exact look-alike of a secret agent who was hung up in the hospital and thus couldn't go back to work. Fred is immediately made into a secret agent himself, and must stop the Big Bad and two Moles from blowing up an entire city—oh, and fix his relationship with Wilma. And it was a musical.

Subverted in terms of themes with Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show. The trio don't become heroes, but it played like a standard episode on a grand scale. Again, one of the Eds' scams fails miserably. We never learn what the scam was, but we see that it injured the other kids greatly. This leads to the Eds having to escape the cul-de-sac via a car chase. Eventually, every character in the series is trekking the countryside, all with the destination of Eddy's Brother's house. And the fact that we actually SEE his brother, who has been The Ghost all this time, makes the movie even bigger.

Also lampshaded with a "In Case of Movie, Break Glass" case, containing a single peanut with a car key inside.

The Sponge Bob Square Pants Movie was much more epic than the show. While most episodes of the show were (and still are) basically about anything and didn't take themselves very seriously at all, the movie involves SpongeBob and Patrick going on an adventure to retrieve King Neptune's stolen crown and, while generally lighthearted, still has some very dramatic moments and unconventional moments. Plankton finally stole the Krabby Patty recipe and the consequences of it were worse than merely driving the Krusty Krab out of business. It's justified because it was intended to be the Grand Finale, with all episodes produced afterwards chronologically occurring before the movie.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water also counts. Bikini Bottom is turned into a hellish apunkalypse, the Big Bad is able to rewrite reality at his will, and the entire thing is generally played more seriously than a regular episode (though it's a lot more lighthearted than the first movie).

The Simpsons Movie involves the family attempting to save Springfield from destruction, by the E.P.A. While many episodes have featured the characters saving something (greyhound puppies, Krusty, the Leftorium) and a few have involved even larger threats ("You Only Move Twice" has Hank Scorpio threatening the UN with a doomsday device, for example), the one in the movie is definitely above average.

Ben 10: While the series is all about the Tennyson's adventures on Earth, Ben 10: Secret of the Omnitrix is all on a galactic scale. Much like the Transformers example, saving the galaxy became a regular thing as well.

An earlier (made for TV) movie, Rocking With Judy Jetson, had the family (primarily Judy, who is given musical aspirations) caught up in a scheme by an alien overlord to remove all music from the universe.

Teacher's Pet was about a talking, thinking dog who disguised himself as a boy so he could go to school. The movie was about said dog and his owner having a summer adventure in Florida where Spot (the dog) sees about becoming a human permanently, though he ultimately decides he'd rather be a dog.

1993’s The Ottifants were Germany’s failed attempt at creating their own animated sitcom à la The Simpsons. Most episodes of its only season had fairly mundane Random Events Plots that were adapted from the newspaper comic it was based on. Then, in 2001, eight years after the show aired, a just as obscure movie was released, in which Paul, Grampa, and Baby Bruno go on an epic quest to find Störtebeker’s treasure to replace the donations Paul accidentally lost betting on pigs in order to save his job and the hospital the donations were for, all the while being hunted by gangsters who want to find the treasure first.

The Powerpuff Girls Movie was first conceived to have all the main villains on the show battle over who would take over Townsville, but creator Craig McCracken found it left little screentime for the girls. He eventually pitched the movie as an origin story for the girls (based on the show's usual opening and in part on the episode "Mr. Mojo's Rising") with the main plot of them unwittingly helping Mojo Jojo set the table in creating a race of supermonkeys.

In the movie ˇMucha Lucha!: The Return Of El Malefico, Rikochet, Buena Girl and The Flea who are The Chosen One must prevent El Malefico from taking over the world.

Several of the Scooby-Doo movies come tomind. Notably in the cartoon, the enemies turn out be bad guys in masks. In the movies they're more likely to encounter actual supernatural threats.

Averted by DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp. Uncle Scrooge and the kids find a magic lamp with a genie in it, but that's barely impressive by the already outlandish standards of the TV show - which, in addition to its famous "racecars, lasers, [and] aeroplanes", also treated viewers to battles with powerful witches and such.

While a few Futurama episodes threaten to destroy the universe (For instance, The Farnsworth Parabox and Time Keeps on Slippin') the movies usually have more at stake.

Slated to be played straight by My Little Pony: The Movie. Simply put, after an Attack of the Town Festival, Twilight Sparkle and the crew are forced to abandon Ponyville and go on a world-spanning friendship adventure to different worlds in order to defeat the latest Big Bad the twisted Storm King, while his dragon is consistently hunting them down, whilst encountering a treacherous conman and a disgraced sea captain as stowaways on her ship. Right off the bat a much different and bigger scale of adventure and stakes compared to the usual stuff.

The Wild Thornberrys Movie ups the antics by having Eliza have to rescue a Cheetah cub from poachers. She is also sent away to boarding school when her grandmother disapproves of her talking with animals. That being said, Eliza had plenty of high scale adventures of her own in the main show - so it's not too drastic a difference.

Dexter's Laboratory had "Ego Trip", where Dexter attempts to save the world from a Bad Future where Mandark takes over, teaming up with his various future selves along the way. The absence of Dee Dee for most of the plot and Mandark taking a level in evil (including traumatizing Dexter through whipping and mentally abusing him)adds a darker tone to the movie than the series. It was also originally intended to be the Grand Finale.

Rolie Polie Olie had the DTV movie The Great Defender of Fun. The movie's plot revolves around Olie and his family and friends teaming up with superhero Space Boy to stop villainous space pirate Gloomius Maxmimus from first ruining Zowie's birthday, then from trying to pull Olie's whole entire planet into a misery-filled galaxy, never to be seen again. While still remaining pretty silly in tone for the most part (in fact, sheer silliness is what resolves the plot), it's a pretty far cry from the whimsical Slice of Life plots the preschooler-aimed show is known for.

Adventure Time: planned but averted in the development of the TV episode "Something Big". As its title suggests, the episode was based around an attempt by a villain, which had been previously foreshadowed, to completely destroy the Candy Kingdom in some of the biggest and most serious battle scenes ever attempted in the show, which was originally intended as the plot for a cinema film. However, when the cinema project was put on hold, the same plot was used in much-abbreviated form for a TV episode, to avoid leaving the plot threads hanging.

The Shaun the Sheep Movie. A typical episode of the TV show involved Shaun and the flock getting up to mild hijinks, and Blitzer trying to put a stop to it before the Farmer notices. In the movie, Shaun's hijinks lead to the Farmer ending up in the Big City with Easy Amnesia, and Blitzer and the flock have to go on a quest to retrieve him, falling afoul of a Diabolical Dogcatcher in the process.

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